Linux

There's been work on Weston to support run-time switchable renderers for Weston. That's now been accomplished and with the latest Git code it's easy to switch from Pixman to the OpenGL renderer. The debug binding of "mod-shift-space W" will now cause the compositor to switch from using the software-based Pixman renderer to the OpenGL renderer. This key-bind renderer switching is useful for debugging, stressing the run-time switchable renderer support, and there's cases where the OpenGL renderer isn't used right away by Weston since the Pixman renderer is able to start-up more quickly.

After many years of using traditional desktop environments like Gnome 2 and KDE and XFCE, I recently spent a few months with Ubuntu 13.04. Overall, my experience with the Unity desktop was fairly positive after I tweaked and configured it to my liking. Since then, I’m using a different non-Ubuntu based distribution, so I’m currently using Mate 1.6. Probably the feature that I most miss from Unity is the launcher. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Unity launcher was so useful and intuitive for me, since I have never been particularly fond of keyboard navigation. Although I still don’t use the keyboard much for window management or within the applications, now that I’m back on Mate I find myself really missing the convenience of searching and launching both apps and files from one unified interface with just a few keywords. With the online results all disabled, Unity’s launcher learns from the user’s habits and quickly becomes uncannily accurate at suggesting relevant local files and applications based on a few letters of input. It really did significantly add to my productivity. The only problem is that the Unity desktop environment, apart from its launcher, is not what everyone wants in a desktop. Additionally, despite a few efforts to port it to other distributions with varying degrees of success, Unity continues to be an option almost exclusively for Ubuntu based systems. So, what other options are available for users who want a launcher like Unity’s, but in a different desktop environment and/or distribution? That’s what I set to find out.

AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 290 graphics card at the beginning of November as one step down from the new flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Numerous Windows reviews praised the graphics card for its great performance, but what wasn't clear at the time was how the Linux performance and compatibility was for this new $399 USD graphics card. AMD hadn't offered any review samples to Phoronix for conducting any Linux-based testing and benchmarking, but it's more clear now why that didn't happen: the Linux performance isn't stellar. I bought an XFX Radeon R9 290 and now there's many Linux benchmarks coming out of this graphics card that's riddled by what might be driver issues. I already regret having purchased the AMD Radeon R9 290 for use on Linux; the graphics card is hot, power hungry, noisy, and the OpenGL results aren't too good.

The company recently updated its watch to improve notification support — a major issue for many reviewers — and says it plans to expand sales promotions for the holiday season in order to boost sales further. Samsung is also looking to expand the number of (Samsung) devices that can interface with the Gear; at launch, the smartwatch was limited to just one smartphone, the Galaxy Note III, but is now also compatible with the company's bestselling Galaxy S 4.

There are many benefits of installing Linux on your PC or laptop. When selecting a new laptop that can support Linux, there are not many that can perform efficiently with a Linux OS. This poses a bit of a problem for people who like to use open-source software as Windows 8 prevents dual-booting, which means you cannot have two OSes running at the same time.

Slovakia-based Fedevel and its Voipac manufacturing partner are prepping an open source computer-on-module and baseboard built around Freescale’s dual-core i.MX6 system-on-chip. The credit-card sized i.MX6 Rex module is equipped with up to 4GB of soldered DDR3 RAM, as well as I/O including gigabit Ethernet, SATA, HDMI, USB, and PCI Express.

The prospect of such a high profile loss, and other organisations following Munich's lead, spurred Microsoft to mount a last ditch campaign to win the authority back. A senior sales executive at the time told general managers in EMEA "under NO circumstances lose against Linux." Steve Ballmer himself took time out of a skiing holiday to make a revised offer in March 2003, followed two months later by Microsoft knocking millions of Euros off the price of sticking with Windows and Office.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.